In a computer system, there exists a commonly used technique in which, upon occurrence of a failure, contents of a memory device (hereinafter also described simply as a memory) are stored in a secondary storage device (this is called a memory dump) and are used to analyze a cause of the failure.
In a conventional memory dump method, it is common that a failing processor device (a processor device will also be described simply as a processor) itself performs storage into a secondary storage device. In this case, when the storage into the secondary storage device cannot be performed in the failing processor, a memory dump cannot be performed.
As a method to solve this, for example, there is a method discussed in Patent Document 1.
In the method of Patent Document 1, when a failing processor can access a secondary storage device, the failing processor loads a failure processing program into a common memory and stores contents of a unique memory of the failing processor in the secondary storage device by using the failure processing program loaded into the common memory.
On the other hand, when the failing processor cannot access the secondary storage device, a specific processor is selected as a support processor from among healthy processors.
Then, the support processor loads the failure processing program into the common memory, and the failing processor copies the contents of its unique memory to the common memory by using the failure processing program loaded into the common memory.
Then, the support processor stores in the secondary storage device the contents of the unique memory of the failing processor copied to the common memory.